The Getty Artists Program extends the department's existing artist-based programs to include individual artist projects or residencies. Invitations are extended to artists who have shown a strong interest in education. One artist is selected each year and given the freedom to select an audience to work with, and to develop the focus and format of their own project.

One goal of the program is to provide invited artists with the opportunity to undertake innovative projects in collaboration with the Museum's staff. The projects provide Museum staff and visitors with new insights and perspectives into the Museum's collections and exhibitions. Thus, our existing audiences have new opportunities for unique learning experiences, and the program has the potential to bring in new audiences.

John Divola, the Getty Artists Program invitee for 2012, works primarily with photography and digital imaging. While he has approached diverse subjects ranging from abandoned houses in his Zuma Series to dogs in Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, Divola remains interested in the relationships between the natural and artificial and the abstract and specific.

For his project, Divola devised a digital scavenger hunt in which participants use cameras to capture subjects drawn from the Getty Center site and J. Paul Getty Museum's collections. Engaging multiple audiences—from students at Hooper Avenue Elementary to college students at Santa Monica College, East Los Angeles College, College of the Canyons, and Pierce College—this playful and open–ended project provides a unique entrée to the museum experience as well as the practice of photography. Divola remarks: "As photographers we delight in the medium because it generally pulls us out into the world, both literally and figuratively, in a heightened state of awareness. This project presents a straightforward invitation to that process."

The resulting images are assembled to create large–scale collective prints that encourage looking and express multiple, individual engagements. The project ultimately calls into question ideas of authorship and allows a large group of individuals to exhibit at the Museum—and is thus playfully subversive.

Learn more about John Divola.

See a selection of projects by Steinkamp's students.

Jennifer Steinkamp, the Getty Artists Program invitee for 2011, is an internationally acclaimed installation artist who works with new media and video to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception.

For her project, [re]vision, Steinkamp addressed the Museum as a site for exploration and inspiration and chose to work with college audiences. During three school terms, students from the Department of Design | Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, were invited to create animation and design projects in response to the Museum's collection and site. Students chose works of art or aspects of surroundings that they found personally compelling, and through a process of interpretation, adaptation, and revision, created new works.

The resulting student projects were presented at Getty Center's annual College Night on May 2, 2011. See a selection of the student projects on this site.

Visit the Open Studio site now to see lesson ideas authored by contemporary artists.

The program launched in 2010 with Open Studio, a project developed by Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford, a recent recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Bradford chose K–12 teachers as his target audience, because he believes that artists should take an active role in providing contemporary-arts education to classrooms. Open Studio is a collection of art-making activities authored by notable national and international artists, including Catherine Opie, Kara Walker, and Xu Bing, who were invited to participate by Bradford and the Museum. These artist-designed materials are posted online, and are thus free and accessible to teachers and students across the country and around the world.